It is a common industry practice in the manufacturing of complex built-to-order products to add additional components (beyond those specified by the customer) in order to make the product minimally functional and testable. These additional components may be referred to as proxy, slave, captive, or golden parts. In some cases components are added to verify functions that the customer may enable later by purchasing added product capabilities at a later date. In any case, these “extra” components required for product test are removed before preparing the product for shipment.
The additional parts added for test can be either managed locally by the test process (most common industry practice) or could be managed by the manufacturing logistics systems in a more tightly controlled fashion. The problem is that in some cases, the product complexity and variability overwhelms the simple logic that is common today with either approach.
Existing solutions include stocking various complex assemblies in the test area or relying on highly-skilled operators to determine what is needed to prepare the customer order for a full test. These approaches are not sufficient for these reasons:                a. Requires financial investment (expense/capital) for inventory to be used as proxy parts.        b. Requires processes for the manufacturing line to manage the quality of the proxy inventory.        c. Requires order scheduling team to understand capacity implications for orders that require these parts. Typically this is really not handled and orders can be stuck in test waiting for test parts.        d. Requires skilled manufacturing operators to identify proxy part requirements and then configure these proxy products to match the customer's solution that requires validation.        e. Stops the production process to recognize, find, and install required hardware. This adds cycle time and drives direct labor costs higher.        f. Limits applicability because it only works if proxy products have limited configuration variations at a product level.        g. Only works in low volume situations.        